Jim Cross wrote: ↑Sat Jul 24, 2021 11:59 amBrian,Brian Wachter wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 6:40 pm In "Helgoland," Carlo Rovelli steers his magnificent Relational Quantum Mechanics straight into the void. He follows the threads of "interactions," his former ontological primitive, into the null space created in materialism when the material is removed and all that is left are reflections of objects that no longer exist.
The funny thing is this is extremely parsimonious--Occam's Razor is used to cut off the very hand of philosophy itself: "There is no ultimate or mysterious essence to understand--that is the true essence of our being."
So mind at large explicitly doesn't exist for Rovelli.
I would be mad too, if M@L were my ontological primitive.
My reading of Helgoland is that Rovelli rejects the idea that there is an ontological primitive. In his view, existence consists solely of relationships and there is no absolute substance underlying them. Matter and mind, both, are relative, neither absolute.
He has a chapter on Nagarjuna that goes through the doctrine of emptiness.
Of course, BK starts his whole approach with the assumption of an ontological primitive. Rejecting that assumption undercuts the entire framework.
And BK is entirely justified in his criticism of Rovelli when the latter rejects an OP. It's fascinating to see how Owen Barfield predicted exactly this Rovelli approach to philosophizing, which is to naively follow the lead of physicalist science in denying the essential and then pretend as if he is coming up with something novel and insightful, as Brian also captured it above. Here is Barfield in his preface to the second edition of Poetic Diction in the 1950s (emphasis mine):
Barfield wrote:If I were writing Poetic Diction today, therefore, it would be the ideas of Hume and his more recent disciples, rather than those of Locke and Kant, that I should feel impelled to criticize in the Appendices; and not the less so because, at the moment of writing, the fashionable method is to analyse language itself which is the heart of my matter.
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I do not think it too sweeping to say that the doctrines of logical of linguistic analysis... are no more than an extensive gloss on this principle. It's corollary, that all the propositions of logic are mere tautologies, is the heart of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which Bertrand Russell translated into English in 1922; and it is this broom with which it is hoped to sweep away, as meaningless, all statements not related to physically observable or verifiable events, to limit the sphere of man's knowledge to the increasingly tentative findings of physical science, and to dismiss all other affirmations as meaningless. For all propositions except those from which some observation-statement can be deduced are, it is averred, meaningless, either as misuse of language, or as tautologies...
In the days of Locke and Hume it was felt that science, the newcomer, required a foundation in philosophy; but since then the two have changed places. The startling and largely beneficent achievements of science in the practical business of manipulating matter and carting it to and fro have so impressed the mind of the empiricist that he is content to treat its ever-changing assumptions as 'given'. If he is a philosopher, he regards it as his business, not to question the scientific assumptions of the day, but rather to justify the ways of science to man.
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It is of course in attempting to describe more precisely the nature of the 'somewhat' that science both parts company with the man in the street and keeps changing its ground. In the nineteenth century the real world was assumed to consist, in the last resort, of things. The things got smaller and smaller molecules, atoms, electrons but they were at least there and if you had a powerful enough microscope you would, it was assumed, see something like a number of billiard-balls, or little solar systems.
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Twentieth-century science has abolished the 'thing' altogether; and twentieth-century philosophy (that part of it, at least, which takes no account of imagination) has obediently followed suit. There are no objects, says the voice of Science, there are only bundles of waves or possibly something else; adding that, although it is convenient to think of them, it would be naïve to suppose that the waves or the something else actually exist. There is no 'referent', echoes the philosophy of linguistic analysis deferentially, no substance or underlying reality which is 'meant' by words. There are only descriptions, only the words themselves, though it 'happens to be the case' that men have from the beginning so persistently supposed the contrary that they positively cannot open their mouths with out doing so.
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'It is true,' says Professor Ryle, 'and even tautologous that the cobbler cannot feel the shoe pinching me, unless the cobbler is myself, but this is not because he is excluded from a peep-show open only to me, but because it would make no sense to say that he was in my pain, and no sense, therefore, to say that he was noticing the tweak that I was having.' (My italics.) I shall return to this, but must remark in passing that this attempt to dismiss the palpable by writing off as tautologous the language in which it is affirmed is surely one of the strangest that has ever bemused a vigorous mind. By the same device black (though it is perhaps better to avoid saying so, because it 'makes no sense') may be thought of as white; for to object that black is 'not white' is to found on a tautology. The theory is, that what is self-evident may for that very reason be profitably ignored.
We should remember here that natural forms and their relations are also "words" - symbols which point to meaning not contained entirely within themselves. Rovelli is classic example of someone who now thinks experience of essential meaning can be ignored because it is so self-evident. That we may as well call black "white", and white "black", because it is self-evident that what is white is 'not black' and vice versa. We may as well call mind "matter", and "matter" mind in the same way, says Rovelli. Barfield then uses a parable to show exactly what Rovelli-types are doing with their "theory of knowledge" and where it will end up:
Barfield wrote:Of all devices for dragooning the human spirit, the least clumsy is to procure its abortion in the womb of language; and we should recognize, I think, that those and their number is increasing who are driven by an impulse to reduce the specifically human to a mechanical or animal regularity, will continue to be increasingly irritated by the nature of the mother tongue and make it their point of attack.
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Once upon a time there was a very large motor-car called the Universe. Although there was nobody who wasn't on board, nobody knew how it worked or how to work it, and in course of time two very different problems occupied the attention of two different groups of passengers. The first group became interested in invisibles like internal combustion; but the second group said the thing to do was to push and pull levers and find out by trial and error what happened. The words 'internal combustion', they said, were obviously meaningless, because nobody ever pushed or pulled either of these things. For a time both groups agreed that knowledge of how it worked and knowledge of how to work it were closely connected with one another, but in the end the second group began to maintain that the first kind of knowledge was an illusion based on a misunderstanding of language. Pushing, pulling and seeing what happens, they said, are not a means to knowledge; they are knowledge. It was an odd sort of car, because, after the second group had with conspicuous and gratifying success tried pushing and pulling all the big levers, they began on some of the smaller ones, and the car was so constructed that nearly all of these, whatever other effect they had, acted as accelerators. Meanwhile the first group held their breath and began to think that their kind of knowledge might perhaps come in useful after the smash.
